Concern for Muslim sensitivities prevents government officials from acknowledging the obvious.

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The Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling for the dismissal of New
York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and the appointment of an outside
inspector-general to run the police force. CAIR and other so-called “mainstream”
Muslim groups have a long-standing grievance with Kelly and the NYPD arising
from a 2007 NYPD Intelligence Report entitled “Radicalization in the West: the
Homegrown Threat” and the NYPD’s ongoing surveillance of radical Islamic
organizations, including mosques.

But the immediate club being used to
hammer Kelly is his participation in a documentary entitled The Third Jihad. The
New York Times has devoted numerous news stories and two editorials to The Third
Jihad, which is described as “anti-Islam” and “a dark film on US Muslims” whose
producers seek to advance a pro- Israel agenda.

The Times coverage failed
to mention the long roster of authorities interviewed for the film, including
the director of the CIA under president Bill Clinton, James Woolsey, the first
secretary of Homeland Security, Gov. Tom Ridge, and a host of former US
government intelligence officials. The title The Third Jihad was provided by the
most eminent living historian of Islam, Professor Bernard Lewis.

I wrote
a long feature article on The Third Jihad when it first appeared two years ago,
and interviewed producer Raphael Shore and narrator Dr. Zuhdi Jasser at length.
So I have taken more than a passing in interest in the controversy.

Far
from being an attack on Islam, the opening lines of the film state clearly:
“This is not a film about Islam. It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a
small percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical.” Jasser, a
devout Muslim of Syrian descent and a former US Navy lieutenant commander, is
the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.

He distinguishes
between Islam as a private faith and Islam as a political doctrine mandating the
worldwide imposition of Shari’a law.

So far, Kelly and his boss, New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have tried to get past the immediate controversy
through now familiar public penance rituals expressing regrets.

It has
been left to others, most notably Woolsey and Ridge, to make the substantive
case for the NYPD’s anti-terrorist policies. In an op-ed in The New York Daily
News (and rejected by the Times), the two argue that the NYPD’s undercover
terror prevention program, including intelligence-gathering within the Muslim
community, has been one of the prime tools allowing the NYPD to foil several
credible threats that have arisen from within the community. And given that even
one successful terror attack in New York City could claims tens of thousands of
lives, the NYPD cannot afford to decrease its intelligence-gathering
activities.

THE TIMES omitted any discussion of the thesis of The Third
Jihad. Jasser holds up a 15-page document at the beginning of the film, which we
eventually learn is a Muslim Brotherhood manifesto for “eliminating and
destroying Western civilization from within,” through use of front groups,
mosques and Islamic centers. The document was uncovered by the FBI in the course
of its investigation leading up to the government’s successful prosecution of
the Holy Land Foundation terrorist funding case.

Terrorism, intones
Jasser, is only one tactic toward the Islamists’ goal of imposing Shari’a across
the globe – a goal shared by many groups who are not themselves involved in
terrorist activity. CAIR, which is specifically mentioned in the document, is
one such group. CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land
Foundation case, and the FBI broke off all relations with the group at the
time.

Abdul Rahman Alamoudi, the founder of the American Muslim Council,
who was invited to speak at an ecumenical service in the National Cathedral
after 9/11, is another so-called “moderate” Muslim. He is shown in The Third
Jihad boasting, “Either we do it now or we do it in a hundred years, but this
country will become a Muslim country.”

The current controversy could
itself be a chapter in The Third Jihad, which discusses the manner in which
Islamist front groups constantly raise the specter of Islamophobia to suppress
discussion of radical Islam.

And it works. Paul Berman writes in The
Flight of the Individuals about how Western intellectuals have been induced to
remain silent on such awkward matters as the historical link between the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Nazis, and the Nazi inspiration for present-day
Islamists.

Concern for Muslim sensitivities prevents government officials
from acknowledging the obvious. After uncovering a plot to blow up the Canadian
parliament and behead the prime minister, a police spokesman described the
plotters as being drawn from a wide cross-section of society, while neglecting
to mention that all were Muslim. Similarly, those plotting to blow up 10
commercial aircraft over the Atlantic were described only as British nationals
of southeastern Asian descent.

Political correctness skews analysis. Dr.
Walid Phares, formerly of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, laments
in The Third Jihad that policymakers treat every issue as discrete and
independent while failing to connect the dots. President Obama’s anti-terrorism
advisor John Brennan, for instance, rejects any discussion of worldwide jihad.
He speaks only of the battle against al-Qaida and its affiliates, while failing
to recognize that al-Qaida is but one of many Muslim Brotherhood offshoots that
share a command ideology, not a single command structure.

The 2010
National Security document pointedly omits any reference to radical Islam and
speaks instead only of “violent extremists.”

The 80-page government
report on the Fort Hood massacre laughably made no mention of the religious
beliefs of Dr. Nidal Malik Hassan, who murdered 13 while shouting “Allahu
Akhbar.” It concluded that “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk
factor.”

In congressional testimony, Attorney-General Eric Holder
repeatedly refused to acknowledge any connection between the Islamic religious
beliefs of the Fort Hood assassin, the Times Square Bomber, and the Christmas
airplane bomber.

THE THIRD JIHAD details numerous ways in which America
is being softened up for Islamic advance. In his interview, Kelly states that
18% of the prisoners in the New York State prison system convert to Islam while
in prison. Prison chaplains receive little screening.

One Muslim former
chaplain is filmed telling prisoners, “Brothers, be prepared to die, be prepared
to kill. [T]his is history, this is the Koran, nobody can deny it... Read it
in... the Koran... When you fight, you strike terror into the heart of the
disbeliever.”

At least 30 compounds associated with Jamaat ul Fuqra, a
radical Pakistani organization, mostly populated by converts to Islam while in
prison, dot the American landscape. In a video obviously not made for public
consumption, we watch practice in ambush tactics and bomb-making in one such
compound.

Perhaps most chilling is the penetration of the American
educational system from the top down. The Saudis have provided $20 million
apiece to Georgetown University and Harvard. Many of the Saudi gifts to
prestigious universities are styled as promoting Islamic-Christian
understanding, which is ironic given that churches are banned in Saudi Arabia
and even the possession of a Christian Bible is forbidden.

Saudi money
funds many American mosques. According to a 2005 report of the Center for
Religious Freedom, “Wahhabism [an extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism and the
official religion of Saudi Arabia] is dominant in many American mosques.” Much
of the official Saudi-supplied literature could be considered hate speech. A
Saudi-sponsored Islamic academy in Virginia, for instance, used textbooks that
promote violence against Christians, Shi’ite Muslims, and Jews.

Even more
frightening is what is happening in American schools. Daniel Pipes told me three
years ago, “Among [the Islamists’ techniques] is manipulation of textbooks at
both the high school and college level. They play on the politically correct
impulse to say nothing negative about non-Western cultures to achieve an
air-brushed picture of Islam.” Last October, Tony Pagliuso, a parent in upscale
Newton, Massachusetts, complained that the following statement in a text called
The Arab World Notebook was pure propaganda: “Over the past four decades, women
have been active in the Palestinian resistance movement. Several hundred have
been imprisoned, tortured and killed by Israeli occupation forces since the
latest uprising, ‘intifada,’ in the Israeli occupied territories.”

The
school principal replied to Pagliuso’s complaint, “Next year we are planning to
teach material that will be even more inflammatory to your sensibilities.” And
the classroom teacher noted proudly that the Notebook had been supplied by the
Outreach Workshop of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. The
Outreach Center, which is recognized as a National Resource Center by the US
Department of Education, trains high school teachers on Middle East issues and
provides free materials. Both the center and the outreach program are heavily
funded by the Saudis. The outreach program is headed by Paul Beran, a prominent
supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against
Israel.

Among other whoppers in the Notebook was this one: “There is no
basis in Islam for the subjugation of women or their relegation to a secondary
role.” Textbooks dealing with Islam regularly cite Islamic doctrine as if it
were factual, omitting such qualifiers as “Muslims believe.” Schools bend over
backwards to show Islam in a favorable light, often spending two weeks of a
world religions unit on Islam and a day each on Christianity and
Judaism.

Fortunately, we do not have to follow The New York Times‘s
politically correct evasion of the issues raised by The Third Jihad. The
documentary can be accessed for free at www.thethirdjihad.com.

The writer
is director of Jewish Media Resources, has written a regular column in The
Jerusalem Post Magazine since 1997, and is the author of eight biographies of
modern Jewish leaders.

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